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Wives' and husbands' housework reporting: Gender, class, and social desirability

Gender & Society; Thousand Oaks; Apr 1998; Julie E Press; Eleanor Townsley;
Volume: 12
Issue: 2
Start Page: 188-218
ISSN: 08912432
Subject Polls & surveys
Terms: Housework
Sex roles
Social classes
Abstract:
Press and Townsley place recent research about changes in wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reporting
differences between different kinds of housework surveys.
Full Text:
Copyright Sage Publications, Inc. Apr
1998
[Headnote]
This investigation places recent research about changes irr wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reporting
differences between different kinds of housework surveys. An analysis of the "reporting gap" between direct-question reports of
housework hours from the National Survey of Families and Households (1988) and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Tme, 1985,
shows that both husbands and wives overreport their housework contributions. Furthermore, gender attitudes, total housework, class,
education, income, family size, and employment status together significantly affect the overreport, although the variables operate in
different ways for wives and husbands. It is concluded that changing and uneven social perceptions of fhe appropriate domestic roles of
women and men have resulted in reporting biases that do not necessarily correspond to actual changes in housework behavior These
findings cast doubt on claims that contemporary husbands are doing more housework than their predecessors.
A central issue of housework research is the degree to which different household members' unpaid contributions to the household have
changed in recent decades. Studies have shown consistently, for example, that in this era of married women's rising labor force
participation, employed wives have reduced dramatically their contribution to domestic labor. The consequence is that husbands' share of
the housework burden, relative to their wives', has increased (Coverman and Sheley 1986; Marini and Shelton 1993; Robinson 1980,
1988). This research suggests further that some husbands-particularly more egalitarian, younger, better educated husbands-have increased
their contribution to housework in absolute terms. These findings are, however, much smaller and less significant than those for wives.
Evidence from longitudinal research about the size and nature of husbands' increased housework contributions is mixed (Coverman and
Sheley 1986; Gershuny and Robinson 1988; Robinson 1988), and increases found in cross-sectional studies are small, not very robust, and
often fail to reach statistical significance (Stafford 1980; Stein 1984).
Despite the inconsistencies, husbands' small increases in housework have been greeted as a triumph of changing gender attitudes. In the
late 1980s Gershuny and Robinson concluded that "[m]en's increase in domestic work time . . . must presumably reflect a change in
norms" (1988, 5;5). Pleck (1982, in Coverman and Sheley 1986) has argued that "men's family work" has increased to the degree that it
testifies "to the magnitude of change in social values about men's roles in the family." Recent popular reports have echoed and magnified
this theme, waxing rhapsodically about the "sensitive new age man" who is learning to participate more equally with his wife in traditional
domestic chores (e.g., Warrick 1994).
We challenge these findings with a model of the "reporting gap" that combines information from two widely used data sets, tie National
Survey of Families and Households (Sweet, Bumpass, and Call 1988) and Americans' Use of Time, 1985 (Robinson 1985a). The reporting
gap we find is large enough to overshadow the small increases in husbands' housework observed in recent years and casts serious doubt on
claims that husbands in the 1980s increased their domestic labor contributions. Indeed, we suggest that observed increases in husbands'
housework contributions may be explained by overreporting behavior.
Reporting differences across housework surveys using different kinds of methods have been documented since the mid-1970s.' Studies
have found consistently that when women and men are asked direct questions about housework time, estimates are higher than when time
diaries are employed to ascertain the same information (for a review, see Marini and Shelton 1993). The mechanisms causing report
inflation across survey contexts remain in some dispute, however, since strictly comparable direct-question and time-diary measures for a
single set of respondents do not yet exist (although see Warner 1986). Reporting differences across survey methods have been variously
attributed to random error (Granbois and Willett 1970), recall or memory problems associated with the frequency or quantity of
housework performed (Hill 1985), double-counting of tasks that respondents perform simultaneously (Juster and Stafford 1991; Robinson
1985b), or better information possessed by those who do the most housework, namely, wives (Fenstermaker Berk and Shih 1980; Warner
1986, see note 2). Against these arguments, we hypothesize that report inflation across surveys is deeply gendered. Drawing on findings
from Arlie Hochschild's (1989) classic study, The Second Shift, we argue that report inflation in the direct-question context is the outcome
of different and uneven social perceptions of the appropriate roles of women and men in the domestic division of labor.
In what follows, we limit our study to the four most frequently performed, female-typed household tasks: preparing meals, washing dishes,
cleaning the house, and doing laundry. These are the only strictly comparable tasks across the two surveys. Operationally narrowing the
definition of housework should not affect the salience of our general findings, however, because there is evidence that husbands have
increased their contributions to these four tasks since the mid- 1970s (Robinson 1988). Indeed, we argue that if any significant change in
the division of household labor is to occur, it will necessarily involve these tasks, because they together comprise more than 50 percent of
the total housework performed in contemporary U.S. marriages (Coverman 1989). Moreover, by using only these four most frequently
performed, female-typed tasks, we can control for the potentially confounding influences of task frequency, the gender typing of tasks, and
the possibility of gender interactions with double-counting.
HYPOTHESES
Memory, Double-Counting, and Information
Researchers have found that report inflation in direct-question contexts compared with diary contexts is highest for the most frequently
performed female-typed household tasks like preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, and doing laundry (Marini and Shelton
1993). Several different explanations for this phenomenon have been offered. Hill (1985) suggests that individual reporting inconsistencies
for less frequently performed tasks like repair and maintenance work can be attributed to measurement error associated with respondents'
memory. Since there is a longer recall period for these tasks, individuals provide lower estimates in a direct-question context than they
would if they were surveyed by the diary method on the day they were actually doing the task. Another explanation of reporting error is
that direct questions produce higher estimates than the time-diary method for these tasks, because they are likely to include double-
counting of tasks that are performed simultaneously (Juster and Stafford 1991). In other words, as task frequency and total housework
increase, so does the report inflation in direct questions compared with time-diary questions.
These arguments yield a first hypothesis: If the overreport between surveys is a cognitive phenomenon connected to generic features of
human memory or to a general misunderstanding of direct housework questions leading to double-counting, then report inflation on these
four tasks should display a similar pattern for wives and husbands. That is, as total housework on these four frequently performed tasks
increases, the overreport should increase in lockstep for both women and men.
Specifically, this hypothesis predicts that although the average estimates of domestic labor time may be inflated for both husbands and
wives, slope differences should not be present (Coverman 1983, note 6). This idea also underpins the argument that there is a relatively
stable ranking of different subgroups' time use, regardless of what method is used, such that housewives perform the most housework,
followed by employed wives, and then employed husbands. Several of the leading researchers in the field agree that notwithstanding
sampling differences and problems of comparability between major direct-question and time-diary surveys, "correlations between
demographic variables and time spent on various activities have been found to be similar using the two methods" (Marini and Shelton
1993; Robinson 1977, 1985a). We do not challenge this finding. We do emphasize, however, that findings about the ordinal ranking of
subgroups-that the averages are different but the slopes are not-should not be confused with arguments about increases in husbands '
contributions to family work in recent years. While data from either the time-diary or direct-question method can be used to adequately
document the overall shape of the housework distribution among subgroups, this does not give us any information with which to evaluate
small changes over time among subgroups, such as the one documented for husbands. The observed increase for husbands could easily be
an artifact of the overreport across surveys.
A second and connected finding about report: inflation is that wives have a higher average overreport between surveys than husbands
because they continue to do the overwhelming majority of these four tasks in contemporary American marriages (Marini and Shelton
1993). Building on the first hypothesis, this second one simply observes that since wives do more housework :han husbands, their report
inflation is likely to be higher than husbands'.
Contrary to these expectations is the third hypothesis that wives' reports of their housework are likely to be more accurate than husbands'
reports because wives have better information. This is an extension of arguments in the spousal consensus literature that state that wives
are better estimators of housework time because they do a disproportionate share of domestic labor and therefore have better information
about it (Fenstermaker Berk and Shih 1980; Warner 1986).2 The logic of this argument is gender neutral since it suggests that individuals
who do the most housework will be the most reliable informant:s because they have the best information. If this third hypothesis is correct,
we expect to find not only that women will have a smaller average reporting gap across surveys than men because they do more
housework than men, but that women who do more housework will have a smaller reporting gap than women who do less housework, and
that men who do more housework will have a smaller reporting gap than men who do less housework. That is, we expect that as total
housework increases, the information needed to estimate household contributions accurately also increases, and therefore reporting
inflation should be smaller.
Social Desirability and Reporting Behavior
Against these three hypotheses, which are all largely concerned with the accuracy of different kinds of housework reports, we argue here
that overreports across surveys are substantively gendered. They are evidence of important differences in social perceptions of what
constitute appropriate levels of housework for women and men in contemporary American marriages. An increasingly egalitarian gender
ideology for both women and men (Sapiro 1991; Simon and Landis 1989), rising rates of married women's labor force participation (U.S.
Census Bureau 1960, 1970; U.S. Department of Labor 1991, 1993; for a discussion of historical trends see Bianchi and Spain 1986), and
popular reports that men are beginning to do more housework have arguably raised expectations that husbands will start to share unpaid
family work more equally with their wives. While this may have led some husbands to do more housework in fact, it is also possible that
husbands who are cognizant of these shifts in societal expectations may say they do more housework than they actually do. We
hypothesize that husbands most vulnerable to such normative societal pressure are those who avow egalitarian gender attitudes, and since
egalitarian attitudes are correlated with age and education, we expect that more educated and younger husbands are likely to feel pressure
to do more housework and/or overreport their housework contributions.
Hochschild's (1989) well-known ethnographic work on the "second shift" suggests further that there might be contradictory effects arising
from interactions between class location, educational levels, and gender attitudes. Although educated husbands are more likely to profess
egalitarian gender attitudes, she found that among those husbands she interviewed, educated liberal husbands actually performed
surprisingly little housework. In the context of the present study, we hypothesize that this mismatch between actual housework and
egalitarian gender attitudes is likely to produce a large overreport. By contrast, Hochschild found that working-class husbands with
employed wives were more likely to profess traditional gender attitudes but, because of income and time constraints associated with class
position, many of them actually shared the domestic burden more equally with their wives. In this case, we expect to find that traditional
husbands will overreport at a lower rate than other husbands.
It is likely that wives feel the pressure of social norms also, although there is reason to expect that the mechanisms producing reporting
discrepancies among wives are different from those of husbands. Despite growing expectations that husbands will share housework more
equally with their wives, the majority of both women and men in the contemporary United States believe that wives are primarily
responsible for housework and child care. Fully 84.4 percent of married men and 88.2 percent of married women surveyed for the National
Survey of Families and Households reported that they "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the statement that "it is much better for everyone
if the man earns the main living and the woman takes care of the home and family." Moreover, Hochschild found that even among those
couples in her study who professed egalitarian attitudes about the domestic division of labor, most wives still took primary responsibility
for housework. In this context of gender-specific expectations about the appropriate roles of wives and husbands in the domestic division
of labor, we expect to find first that wives continue to perform the vast majority of housework. Second, we suggest that these widespread
gender-specific beliefs about domestic roles give rise to gender-specific expectations about the particular amounts of housework husbands
and wives should perform, which, in turn, is reflected in wives' reporting behavior. Since both women and men expect that wives will
perform much more housework than husbands, we hypothesize not only that wives will perform more housework than husbands, on
average, but that the size of wives' overreport will be correspondingly larger as they attempt to meet social expectations about wifely roles.
Such a finding would be in line with earlier studies (Marini and Shelton 1993).
Third, we argue that social expectations about wives' housework contributions are also likely to be structured by wives' education and
class position, similarly to husbands'. However, in the gendered climate of social expectations described above, we hypothesize that the
pattern of overreporting will be reversed for wives. While we expect egalitarian, educated husbands to overreport more than traditional
working-class husbands, we expect that privileged women, especially those who earn income of their own, are more likely to report their
housework accurately than poorer women confronting the time constraints of housework, child care, and employment. This is our
"supermom" hypothesis: Privileged women with sufficiently large incomes of their own are more able to "buy their way" out of time
constraints associated with housework and child care, thus fulfilling genderspecific social expectations about their domestic roles, leading
to more accurate housework reporting. By contrast, it is possible that less-privileged working moms who face the conflict between time
constraints and social expectations may overreport their housework to meet social expectations about wifely roles that are increasingly
difficult to meet (and this may be especially true if these women are confronting a middle-class, educated survey taker). Such
overreporting occurred among many of the employed wives interviewed in Hochschild's qualitative ethnographic study.
DATA AND RESEARCH STRATEGY
Conceptualizing the Reporting Gap
To investigate these competing hypotheses, we focus on the size of the reporting gap. That is, how many housework hours do respondents
report to survey takers compared with the number of hours they spend doing housework? Operationally, we measure the gap between
direct-question reports of time spent in housework from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) (Sweet, Bumpass, and
Call 1988) and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Time, 1985 (AUT) (Robinson 1985a). The AUT time-diary data are treated as
the baseline for housework in our model, despite the possibility that report inflation probably occurs to some extent even when this method
is used. But in the absence of ideal data from our problem we are satisfied with this, since time-diary data have been found to be the most
stable, reliable, and valid way to measure time spent in housework in many studies (Juster and Stafford 1985; Robinson 1977, 1985a;
Scheuch 1972; Walker 1968; Szalai 1966). Indeed, if we can document that it is not general memory or cognitive factors that structure the
overreport between surveys but rather uneven and gendered perceptions of changing domestic roles, this is good evidence that the bias
arising from overreporting is a substantive gender phenomenon and that the problem affects time-diary as well as direct-question reports
of housework data.
While earlier studies have compared average reporting differences across surveys (Marini and Shelton 1993; Pleck 1985), they have been
plagued with problems of comparability between questions, differences between the tasks enumerated by different surveys, and sampling
differences. In this study, by contrast, we have limited ourselves to highly comparable questions and categories and have devised a way to
directly compare different reports in a single model for a nationally representative sample of married women and men. By combining
information from the surveys, we can estimate directly a distribution of individual measures of the reporting gap between diary and direct-
question housework reports.
Data
The National Survey of Families and Households is a national probability sample of 13,017 adults interviewed between March 1987 and
May 1988 (Bumpass and Sweet 1985; Sweet, Bumpass, and Call 1988). The NSFH contains a wealth of information about respondents'
sociodemographic characteristics and household activities. Participants were interviewed in person and certain sets of questions were self-
administered to respondents. The housework question was the first of these self-administered portions. Interviewers handed respondents a
form to read and fill out during the interview that asked them to "Write in the approximate number of hours per week that you . . .
normally spend doing the following things." The selection of tasks includes preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning house, outdoor
tasks, shopping, washing and ironing, paying bills, auto maintenance, and driving. Note that there was no prohibition against overlapping
reports in the NSFH instrument. That is, two of the tasks might have been done at the same time and reported as 10 minutes each for the
same 10-minute period, for example, which may have resulted in an increase in respondents' direct-question reports as an artifact of the
question wording.
In contrast, the data used as the baseline of housework hours were drawn from the third round of the Michigan time-budget study,
Americans' Use of Time, 1985, also a national probability sample (Robinson, 1985a). A more restrictive survey instrument than the NSFH,
this questionnaire asked 4,939 respondents to record in single-day time diaries each activity they engaged in over a 24-hour period. Diaries
were collected by telephone, mail-back, and; personal interviews. The sampling universe included adults of at least 18 years who lived in
households with telephones. Diary days for the sample were evenly distributed across days of the week. Respondents were required to note
in their diaries the time the activity began and the time it ended. They were also asked to record primary, secondary, and tertiary activities
during each time period, in case more than one activity occurred simultaneously. We use data for the primary activity only. Compared
with the NSFH, then, the AUT had the advantage of compelling respondents, at least nominally, to time their domestic labor while they
did it, producing a more detailed and, arguably, more reliable account. The trade-off, however, is that despite providing detail and
accuracy in housework reporting, the AUT sample provides only limited sociodemographic data. Since the rich information about
cohabiting couples and the variety of household structures provided by the NSFH were not included in the AUT, our study is limited to
individual married women and men.3 When only married respondents are selected, there are 6,882 cases in the NSFH sample and 2,844
cases in the AUT sample.4 We applied sample weights to both data sets so they would be nationally representative and used a day weight
provided by the authors of the AUT to account for differences in the day of the week that diaries were kept.
Measuring Housework: Gender-Stereotyped Tasks and the Synthetic Week The first issue to be resolved in analyzing the two surveys was
whether the daily estimates produced under the AUT method could be aggregated into meaningful synthetic weekly estimates that were
comparable with those in the NSFH. Since the AUT time-diary study takes a 24-hour period as its unit of analysis, many activities that are
done weekly (like mowing the lawn), or less often (like cleaning the oven or repairing the car), will not be captured in the diary for a large
percentage of respondents.5 A connected source of potential bias is gender differences in reporting across days of the week. We know that
women perform the bulk of these four household tasks and it is possible that while wives may perform these tasks daily, husbands may
perform these tasks at their discretion, resulting in large reports from husbands on the weekends and small reports on weekdays. To
investigate this possibility, we compared the average reports of housework on these four tasks for each day of the week and by gender.
Results are documented in Figure 1, which shows very little variation in average housework for either husbands or wives across the days
of the week. (As expected, of course, there is a large total weekly difference between wives and husbands.) An analysis of variance
performed on the distribution of reports across weekend and week days, as well as gender, showed no significant differences. Thus, we
have confidence in our construction of synthetic weekly reports for the AUT respondents for these four tasks. We constructed synthetic
weeks by aggregating housework hours for the four included tasks and by multiplying the sum by seven.6
Method
Our analysis proceeds in two parts. First, we predict respondents' housework contributions in the NSFH sample from a model of
housework contributions in the AUT time-diary sample. In the time-diary sample, 47.1 percent of husbands report zero hours of
housework each week, while only 5.5 percent of wives report zero. The amount reporting zero in the direct-question sample is 20.9
percent for husbands and 0.5 percent for wives. Including all the zero responses in our analysis using ordinary regression techniques would
produce inconsistent estimates and would dramatically inflate the size of husbands' reporting gap across the surveys. Therefore, we isolate
those who report zero hours of housework from those who report some housework and treat them separately. The method for doing this is
a censored regression model for limited dependent variables, also known as a Tobit model. Specifically, we use ordinary least squares
(OLS) regression modified by a two-step Heckman procedure (Berk 1983; Heckman 1976; Maddala 1983).7 The Heckman procedure is
designed to account for the fact that housework is inherently censored at zero and that there is a high percentage of husbands reporting
zero housework hours.8
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The next step in our construction of a measure of the reporting gap across the surveys is to apply the OLS model produced by the
Heckman procedure on the AUT to the NSFH respondents to estimate how much housework they would have reported if we also had
time-diary responses for them. To do this, we merely multiply the estimated coefficients from our AUT model by the values of those
variables for each respondent in the NSFH. Equation 1 shows this operation algebraically. (The resulting coefficients are presented later,
in Table 4.) This operation produces a variable in the NSFH sample that provides an estimate of diary-reported housework hours per week
for each respondent. where b(^sub o...n^ ) are the estimated regression coefficients and X(^l... n^) are the values of the independent
variables for each respondent.
In the second step of our analysis, we subtract this total housework prediction from the direct-question report provided by each respondent
in the NSFH, a difference we term the reporting gap. Finally, we use multiple regression analysis to examine correlates of the reporting
gap.
Our method relies on three assumptions. The first assumption is that the two sets of respondents are interchangeable; that is, since they are
both based on national probability samples, weighted to represent the U.S. population, we can think of them as two random subsamples
from the same census. We are satisfied that the samples are quite similar because Table 1 shows no substantial differences between the
distributions of respondents across a range of background characteristics, although the NSFH respondents are slightly upscale. Second, we
assume that two nationally representative samples will produce errors across the two data sets that are largely uncorrelated. Third, we
assume that time-diary data are a relatively accurate measure of the amount of time people spend doing housework. As a corollary, we
assume there is no gender difference in the measurement error associated with the diary reports.
Explanatory Variables
The first part of the analysis uses the following variables to estimate hours spent in female-typed housework tasks. Gender is a dummy
variable coded 1 for females and 0 for males. In addition, we control for six well-established predictors of housework hours:
1. number of paid work hours (continuous),
2. a six-category ordinal education variable,
3. a four-category ordinal household income variable,
4. number of children younger than 5 (continuous),
5. number of children aged 5 to 18 (continuous)y, and
6. a two-level dummy variable for age cohort with those born before 1950 coded as
The set of possible controls was limited to these six variables because they are the only relevant predictors of housework that are
comparable across the two surveys. Table I compares the explanatory variables from the NSFH and the AUT. This profile describes how
respondents are distributed on the six independent variables and demonstrates that the two samples are highly comparable. Figures shown
here are weighted and include only cases that are nol missing on any of the independent variables or the dependent variable.9
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TABLE 1:
The distributions of the explanatory variables used in the reporting gap models in the second part of our analysis are presented in Table 2.
Since investigation of the reporting gap takes place wholly in the context of the NSFH sample, comparability limitations are lifted and the
selection of more theoretically driven variables and codings is enabled. Measures include gender (1 = female), predicted total housework
hours, predicted total housework hours squared (to allow for the possibility of nonlinearity), paid work hours (continuous), number of
children in the household (continuous), household income in $10,000s (continuous), age (continuous), education (four dummy variables),
and socioeconomic index as precoded in the NSFH (smaller numbers are lower socioeconomic status).
In addition, a gender ideology scale was constructed by standardizing and summing six attitude items about gender roles in families, with
lower numbers signifying more traditional attitudes and higher numbers signifying more egalitarian attitudes. The individual attitude
scales asked respondents for approval ratings of (1) mothers who work full-time when their youngest child is younger than 5 and (2)
mothers who work part-time when their youngest child is younger than 5. Also asked was extent of agreement on four items: It is much
better for everyone if the man earns the main living and the woman takes care of the home and family; preschool children are likely to
suffer if their mother is employed; parents should encourage just as much independence in their daughters as in their sons; and if a
husband and a wife both work full-time, they should share household tasks equally (see Lennon and Rosenfield 1994 for an in-depth
discussion of this scale).
ANALYSIS
The Two-Sample Comparison: A Tale of Two Gaps
The preliminary evidence that a reporting gap exists is shown in Table 3, which documents the distribution of housework hours reported in
the time-diary sample and compares it with reports from the direct-question sample. Using either survey method as the measure, wives do
much more housework than husbands. If we take the time-diary measure as the most accurate, husbands spend an average of less than one-
quarter of the time wives do (4.2/18.4 hours) performing these four household tasks each week. This corroborates what is already well-
known about the domestic division of labor. Second, the direct-question estimates are much higher than the time-diary reports for both
wives and husbands. These differences suggest that, regardless of gender, respondents tend to overreport their contributions to housework
when a survey gives them the opportunity to do so. On average, wives estimate they perform about 31.8 hours a week but only record
about 18.4 hours in the time diaries. Husbands self-report their housework at 7.7 hours per week but record only 4.2 hours in the diaries.
Table 3 also shows that there is a gender gap in overreporting. Wives overreport their housework contributions on average by 13.4 hours
per week (31.8 - 18.4) compared with husbands' average overreport of about 3.5 hours per week (7.7 -4.2). These means tell a tale of two
gaps between the surveys: a reporting gap, in which direct-question estimates of housework tend to be overestimates for everybody, and a
gender gap in overreporting, in which wives tend to exaggerate by more than husbands do. However, although this comparison of
unconditional means provides prima facie support for hypotheses about double-counting and memory effects, individual-level data in a
multivariate context are required to determine what factors explain the reporting gap phenomenon.
Estimating the Reporting Gap in a Multivariate Context
To estimate time-diary reports of total housework for each individual in the NSFH, we modeled housework in the AUT time-diary sample
and used the model to compute housework in the NSFH. Results of the AUT model of housework are shown in Table 4. We multiplied the
coefficients in Table 4 by the values of those variables in the NSFH, summing the results for each respondent. This prediction is our best
estimate of the time-diary report of weekly housework hours for each respondent in the NSFH.
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TABLE 2:
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TABLE 3:
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TABLE 4:
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TABLE 5:
To compute the reporting gap, we subtracted the prediction of total weekly housework from each NSFH respondent's self-report. The
resulting distribution describes a new variable that can now be analyzed to assess the effects of gender, gender attitudes, and total
housework on reporting behavior between the surveys.
Reporting Gaps and Putative Increases in Husbands' Housework
Table 5 confirms what we found using mean differences across the samples, lending credibility to the robustness of the predictive model.
Wives' average reporting gap of 12.8 hours per week in absolute terms is nearly twice as big as husbands' (5.8 hours per week). Notice,
however, that in relative terms, when the overreport is placed in the context of the total amount of time respondents spent doing these four
household tasks, husbands are found to overreport at a much higher rate than wives: 149 percent (5.8/3.9) compared with 68 percent
(12.8/18.7), respectively, if mean values are used.
Even if we ignore this relative overreport, however, and limit the analysis to the lower estimate of husbands' overreport in absolute terms,
5.8 hours a week is still large enough to account for the increase in husbands' housework contributions claimed in recent studies. For
example, Gershuny and Robinson's (1988) analysis of housework contributions to all unpaid household tasks (excluding shopping and
travel) between 1975 and 1985 finds an increase for husbands of only 2.3 more hours each week." They found a similar increase among
British husbands between 1974 and 1984. Older studies report similar increases for earlier periods (Davis 1983; Stafford 1980). All of
these observed increases for husbands could be explained easily by overreports such as the one we uncover.
At issue is the interpretation of observed increases in husbands' housework. If there is report inflation across the surveys, can such
increases be adduced as evidence of changes in husbands' family roles and gender values? If the overreport can be explained as a generic
phenomenon affecting husbands and wives similarly, then report inflation in the direct-question context might be dismissed as a technical
problem and the small increases found in hus;bands' housework over time interpreted safely as a change in the family division of labor, as
many researchers have observed. However, if we find evidence of large and significant gender differences, then overreporting becomes
much more than simply a technical problem. In what follows, we test these hypotheses.
Analyzing the Reporting Gap: Gender, Information, Double-Counting, and Memory
Results of multiple regression to analyze the reporting gap are presented in Table 6. This model tests the effects of all the variables for the
full population of husbands and wives to evaluate the magnitude and significance of the gender effect on overreporting behavior. Table 6
documents that gender is a very large and highly significant predictor of overreporting. Net of the other independent variables, wives are
likely to overreport 16.63 more hours a week than husbands, and this is by far the largest effect in the model. In short, the equation in
Table 6 confirms our hypothesis that overreporting is, indeed, gendered even when controlling for socioeconomic factors. Next, we break
the analysis down by gender to investigate whether or not overreporting behavior is structured similarly for wives and husbands."
Recall that the hypotheses about double-counting, memory, and information all predict overreporting behavior to be patterned similarly for
both genders. In contrast to the three gender-neutral hypotheses, we argue that perceptions of the social desirability of doing a great deal of
housework are gendered and that gender differences across a range of characteristics will explain how wives' and husbands' overreporting
behavior is structured. Models 1 and 3 in Table 7 show the analysis of the reporting gap broken down by gender, and it is immediately
apparent that the findings are quite different for women and men.
First, the negative association between level of total housework and the reporting gap is much smaller for husbands than wives. A one-
hour increase in total housework each week decreases wives' overreport by about 2 hours and 23 minutes a week. For husbands, the
decrease is only about 45 minutes a week. The negative relationships between total housework and the reporting gap for both spouses
suggest that we reject the argument that overreports are primarily the product of double-counting or that overreports are associated with
generic human memory problems that lead to report inflation in the direct-question context. Rather, the more housework a respondent
performs, the more accurately he or she reports housework contributions on a survey-one prediction of the information hypothesis. This
result is illustrated in Figure 2, which depicts the reporting gap for wives and husbands over relevant ranges of total housework, based on
models 1 and 3?2
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TABLE 6:
However, the effects of information associated with total housework are not gender neutral. The much steeper negative slope for wives
indicates that information operates more effectively for wives than for husbands, a difference that is statistically significant at the .OS level
(see Jccard, Turrisi, and Wan 1990, 49 for a discussion of this statistical test). Perhaps wives experience a greater increase in reporting
accuracy with additional levels of information because they perform more housework on average; the higher levels of wives' average total
housework would tug at the regression line, affecting the slope for women as a group.
Enlarge 200%

Enlarge 400%
TABLE 7:
Enlarge 200%

Enlarge 400%
Figure 2:
The most important point here, however, is that there is very little actual overlap in the gender distributions. One could use the reporting
gap models to make predictions beyond the range of the data to investigate what would happen to wives' reporting gap at low levels of
total housework and what would happen to husbands' reporting gap at high levels of total housework However, these may be illegitimate
counterfactuals, given the tiny number of wives doing low levels of housework and the complete absence of husbands doing high levels of
housework. Oversampling these unusual groups of wives and husbands in future research may be the only way to address counterfactual
questions such as these directly, and even then, it is unclear that findings would be generalizable to the ret of the population. What we can
say is that the information hypothesis is partially confirmed by this analysis since the overreport decreases as total housework increases for
both wives and husbands, net of other effects. We must also conclude, however, that the information associated with higher levels of total
housework operates in a gendered way, with a strong negative effect for wives and a weak negative effect for husbands.
The Social Desirability Hypothesis: Gender, Toted Housework, and Class
The idea that propensities to overreport are gendered is also supported by the finding in Table 7 that the effects of attitudes toward gender
roles in the family on the reporting gap operate inversely for wives and husbands. This process was masked in the first model based on the
whole population (Table 6). Once the analysis is broken down by gender, however, we find that egalitarian wives overreport by less than
traditional wives, since, we argue, egalitarian wives are less vulnerable to normative gender expectations about their housework as
women's work. We also find that egalitarian husbands overreport by more than traditional husbands for the same reason-traditional
normative expectations are of a husband who does little housework.
To test these arguments further, we included two dummy variables in the regression model for men to capture the interaction between
husbands' gender attitudes and total housework. The first dummy variable is coded 1 for those husbands professing egalitarian gender
attitudes but doing little housework (3.8 percent of the sample), and all other husbands are coded 0. The second dummy variable identifies
those men with traditional gender attitudes who contribute comparatively high levels of total unpaid work to the household (13.3 percent
of the sample). Table 8 compares these two groups of husbands on the variables in the model. It confirms our belief that we are tapping a
class difference in reporting behavior with these measures. Those egalitarian husbands who do little housework are much more likely to be
highly educated, to earn more income, and to work longer hours in the labor market than those husbands who profess traditional attitudes
but perform comparatively high levels of total weekly housework.13
The fourth column of Table 7 presents the results of this analysis with these two new variables included. The first thing to note is that with
the "Hochschild dummies" in the model for husbands, the effects of all the other independent variables are insignificant.'4 Net of the
interaction between total levels of housework and gender attitudes for these two groups of husbands, the other variables do not
systematically structure husbands' overreports. Second, the effects of the two dummy variables are strong and significant and work in the
expected direction.t5 Egalitarian husbands who do little or no house;work overreport nearly three hours more housework each week than
other husbands. By contrast, traditional husbands who do comparatively high levels of housework overreport nearly two hours and twenty
minutes less than other husbands each week. Figure 3 uses model 4 to illustrate this marked relative difference between the average
overreports of these two kinds of husbands in absolute levels of the reporting gap, controlling for the other independent variables.
Enlarge 200%

Enlarge 400%
TABLE 8:
These findings strongly support the gendered social desirability hypothesis since husbands' overreports are shown to be predicted by the
interaction of gender attitudes and total weekly housework on these four tasks. Moreover, once the dummy variables are included in the
model for husbands, factors that would presumably increase the demand for housework, such as hours spent in paid work and the number
of children at home, appear to have little effect on husbands' overreporting.
The proposition that overreporting is gendered is also confirmed by comparing the wide variety of factors affecting wives' propensity to
inflate their reports in the direct-question context, relative to husbands (compare models 1 and 3). The number of paid work hours in the
labor market, the number of children at home, household income, gender ideology, education, socioeconomic status, and total housework
all affect the size of wives' overreport. By contrast, in the same model for husbands (model 3), only gender ideology and total housework
contribution affect the reporting gap. And, as discussed above, when interactions between husbands' gender attitude and total housework
are included (model 4), they are the only significant factors found to determine husbands' overreports. These findings suggest that the
overreport may be structured very differently for wives and husbands.
Note further that while most of the explanatory variables are found to decrease overreporting for wives, the number of children at home
has a large positive effect on the overreport. For each additional child, wives' average overreport increases by 3.5 hours a week, net of the
other independent variables. It is possible, given the cultural value placed on children as well as perceptions that children's needs are more
important than mothers' needs, that gender-specific social expectations about wives' housework become even heavier, and that wives with
young children overreport their housework contributions at an even higher rate than other wives to meet these heightened expectations.
Although this argument is difficult to test under current data constraints, the important point here, too, is that this is a gendered finding.
The number of children at home has no significant effect on husbands' reporting gap but a large, statistically significant effect on wives'
overreporting behavior.
For this reason, we focus on wives with at least one child to test our "supermom" hypothesis. This states that privileged working mothers
are able to "buy" their way out of housework and child care and thus meet gendered social expectations and fulfill wifely roles more
"easily" than poorer supermoms. Since they fulfill social expectations more easily, we hypothesize that more privileged working mothers
are likely to report their housework more accurately than other wives. By contrast, we suggest that working mothers facing similar social
expectations as other mothers, but who possess fewer economic resources to substitute for their own labor, are more likely to feel the
weight of gendered social expectations about housework more heavily and thus overreport their housework at a higher rate than privileged
working mothers. Model 2 in Table 7 includes our supermom variable coded 1 for wives with at least one child at home and who as
individuals, also earn $20,000 or more each year (this cutoff occurs at the 85th percentile of the distribution, identifying reasonably
privileged waged women).
Enlarge 200%

Enlarge 400%
Figure 3:
The inclusion of the supermom variable in model 2 does not alter the relative size or significance of most of the main effects in the wives'
equation. It remains true that more highly educated, better paid, higher status wives who are employed full-time in the labor market
overreport at a lower rate than less-privileged wives in poorer households with lower occupational status or wives who earn no income in
the labor market. However, in addition to these findings, model 2 shows that the coefficient for the supermom dummy is large, negative,
and significant (see note 19). Wives with at least one child at home who earn $20,000 or more each year are likely to overreport, on
average, three and one--half hours less each week than other wives. This finding further confirms our argument that overreporting is not a
technical problem, operating the same way lor wives and husbands because of question wording or generic human memory problems.
Although our models are limited and R-squares are small, our analysis nonetheless persuades us that reporting behavior is a substantive
social phenomenon rooted in the crosscutting interplay of class and gender for different groups of women and men.16
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
In sum, we have found first that both husbands and wives tend to overreport their housework contributions. There is a mean overreport of
housework of at least 5.8 hours for husbands and 12.8 hours for wives. Recall, however, that when the total amount of time each
respondent spends in housework is taken into account, the relative overreport is 149 percent for husbands and 68 percent for wives.
Second, we have provided evidence that there are large and significant gender (and class) differences in the level and structure of
overreporting between wives and husbands across survey contexts. Specifically, gender attitudes, which are our best measure of
respondents' social perceptions about housework, affect husbands' and wives' reporting behavior in opposite directions; traditional
attitudes reduce husbands' reporting gap while they increase wives'. There are also significant gender differences in the effect of
information on husbands' and wives' overreports: Higher levels of information reflected by higher levels of total housework lead to much
lower overreports for wives than husbands. Differences in the effects of the number of children at home on overreporting are also
gendered; the presence of children increases wives' overreports but has no significant effect on husbands' reporting behavior. Finally, we
found that while more privileged husbands with egalitarian gender attitudes tended to overreport at a higher rate than more traditional
husbands, more privileged working mothers were likely to report more accurately than poorer "supermoms." This suggests that the effects
of gender mediate the effects of class and educational privilege quite differently for wives and husbands. Together, these findings
demonstrate that the reporting gap between housework surveys cannot be explained fully by memory, double-counting, or information.
Rather, social desirability in the face of gendered social expectations appears to structure reporting bias.
We argue that these findings are the best possible representation of individual overreporting behavior in housework surveys given current
data constraints. Although our study is based on reports for only four stereotypically "female" tasks that are not inclusive of all household
tasks performed in contemporary American households, these tasks do comprise the majority of all housework performed (Coverman
1989). And, although R-squares are small, our findings about the relationships between gender and overreporting are large and statistically
significant. Despite limitations, then, we conclude that differences between reports of housework contributions using time-diary and
direct-question report techniqueswhat we have labeled the overreport in our analysis-are socially structured by gender and the interactions
of gender with class as survey respondents try to meet changing social expectations about housework.
Reflecting in conclusion on these findings, we believe our results have several implications for studies of housework as well as all studies
that use quantitative data about gender. First, our findings that husbands and wives overreport their housework in the National Survey of
Families and Households and that the reporting gap is gendered, suggest that the data that policy makers and analysts rely on are
profoundly affected by gender differences in reporting. This result indicates caution at the very least when using data such as these.
The same logic applies to other gender-related data as well. There may be gender differences in reporting in many other sorts of
quantitative data, including timediary data, that are almost impossible to distinguish from the effects of gender on the outcome being
studied. After all, gender is one of the central axes of social stratification, so gendered reporting differences could affect all kinds of
measures of attitudes and behaviors, particularly those clearly connected to gender relations. For example, reports about sexual practices,
beliefs about gender roles, attitudes toward social policy initiatives, or the ranking of political candidates on issues like abortion or
contraception could all suffer from gender differences in reporting such as the ones we identify. We would suggest that scholars interested
in collecting any kind of attitudinal or behavioral data on gender compare and contrast different measures, building into the data collection
process close analysis of pretest data to explore the possibility of large gendered reporting effects. Furthermore, given well-known
comparability problems across surveys, we echo the pleas of earlier researchers that data be collected on time, task, and frequency
measures of common household tasks, making sure that respondents know that interviewers are interested in primary tasks and that
estimates should not be overlapping.
In addition, since caring for children is the major determinant of whether a woman stays at home, it is a very important aspect of the
gender division of household labor. We were not able to include child care as a housework task in our study because of measure
incompatibility across surveys. We suggest that studies of housework should better account for the independent and combined
relationships of child care work with other housework tasks, so that the important and timeconsuming task of child care can be better
conceptualized as part of housework.
Second, our analysis strongly suggests that gendered differences in social perceptions produce overreports of housework from husbands
that are sociologically important. Although wives overreport too, this is not as serious a sociological or policy problem as it is for
husbands. In a historical context in which women have reduced dramatically their contributions to unpaid domestic labor in the household,
underestimating wives' overreports, and consequently overestimating their housework contributions, does not radically affect the
substantive conclusions researchers reach about wives' changing contributions to the domestic division of labor. For husbands, however,
the overreport we document is large enough to cast serious doubt on the conclusion that husbands have increased their supply of domestic
labor to the household in the past 25 years.
While evidence from longitudinal research about the size and nature of husbands' increased housework contributions is mixed (Coverman
and Sheley 1986; Gershuny and Robinson 1988), and the increases in husbands' housework contributions claimed for cross-sectional
studies are small, not very robust, and often not statistically significant, some researchers have nonetheless argued that a convergence of
gender roles may be in the making (Gershuny and Robinson 1988; Pleck 1985; Stafford 1980; Stein 1984). Reports in the popular media
of survey findings that husbands are contributing more time and attention to housework also declare a revolution in family roles. All this
highlights the politicized nature of issues surrounding gender and housework in contemporary American culture. It also raises a question
in the sociology of knowledge about why housework analysts so fervently wish to find an increase in husbands ' housework contributions.
Whatever the answer to this question, the huge interest in husbands' increasing housework and the politicization surrounding the purported
gender revolution in the domestic division of labor lend weight to our argument that widespread changes in social expectations about
husbands' domestic roles are affecting how husbands report their housework behavior. We are not suggesting that husbands are lying.
They may believe they are doing more housework. Or perhaps changing social expectations make husbands feel as though they should be
doing more, or may focus their attention on what little they do, leading to an overreport in the survey interview context. We cannot
distinguish among these explanations with our data. What we have shown, however, is that husbands overreport their housework
contributions in the direct-question survey context. And this overreport may underpin conclusions that husbands have increased their
housework contributions in recent years. Given the size of the overreports that we document then, and in light of the finding that
overreporting is structured very differently for wives and husbands, we contend that there is little basis on which to conclude that a change
in husbands' contributions to family work has actually occurred. Rather, our analysis reveals that wives still perform the bulk of
housework in U.S. marriages and that most husbands do no housework, or only a few hours a week. Indeed, there is no evidence, once the
overreport we have identified is taken into account, that husbands are doing any more housework than their predecessors who were
interviewed by social scientists more than a quarter of a century ago.
[Footnote]
NOTES

[Footnote]
1. There is also evidence of spousal inconsistency within surveys (Fenstermaker Berk and Shih 1980; Warner 1986), but this falls outside
the scope of the present study, which is limited to reporting differences between surveys for a sample of individual married women and
men.
2. Fenstermaker Berk and Shih's (1980) important study accounted for the spousal inconsistency surrounding husbands' housework
contributions by arguing that since wives participate in a wider variety of household tasks and do much more housework on average than
husbands, "they may be forced to override more traditional stereotypes in their accounts of their own and their husbands' participation . . .
wives may be less vulnerable to normative assumptions and more likely compelled to describe their actual work lives" (Fenstermaker Berk
and Shih 1980, 206; also see Warner 1986). Although these arguments were developed in the context of spousal studies, the reasoning is
applicable to gender comparisons across survey contexts where we do not have comparable information on spouses.

[Footnote]
3. Note that our data consist of married individuals rather than matched married couples since the Americans ' Use of Time, 1985 (AUT)
(Robinson 1985a) did not survey actual spouses in its third round. This is true of many housework surveys and is problematic for studies
of the domestic division of labor where one unit of analysis must be the couple that negotiates who does what housework.
4. Three outliers from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) (Bumpass and Sweet 1985; Sweet, Bumpass, and Call
1988) and one from the AUT were also excluded from the following analyses, because in the two-sample context the disposition of the
regression surface is particularly sensitive to extreme values. Two of these outliers were also greater than the number of hours in a week,
which is well beyond the range of time possible for performing housework in a week.
5. The result of using data on more infrequently performed tasks would have been to either badly overestimate or underestimate the
reporting gap. For example, respondents would be self-reporting a "typical" amount of car repair in the NSFH context, but in the time-
diary context they would record either that they did 0 or that they did 8 hours of car repair that day. In either case, such extreme estimates
are not comparable with the weekly estimates provided in the self-reported summary data. This problem is avoided in part by limiting our
study to the four most frequently performed household tasks, since the day of the week a respondent was surveyed would not likely bias
aggregated estimates of weekly housework contributions.

[Footnote]
6. As a further check, we factor-analyzed all the housework items in both data sets and found that these four female-typed tasks loaded
together.
7. For the first part of the Heckman correction, we ran a probit analysis on all the observations to model the probability that a respondent
reports zero housework versus the chance that she or he reports some housework each week. The predicted probability values from the
probit equation represent a random, standard normal variable. These probability values, denoted z below, are then used to compute

[Footnote]
a hazard rate for each respondent that represents the instantaneous probability of reporting zero housework, conditional on being in the
pool at risk (Berl 1983; Tuma 1982, 8-10). The hazard rate, calculated with the following equation for each observation, is treated as a
substantive variable in the ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis that followed.

[Footnote]
Hazard Rat = f(zi) / [i - F(zi)],

[Footnote]
where f(z,) is the probability density function and F(z;) is the cumulative distribution function for the ith respondent. For the second part of
the Heckman correction, we exclude those who reported zero hours and model housework behavior on the remaining respondents. In this
linear OLS model, the dependent variable is continuous rather than binary and the model includes a variable for the hazard rate in addition
to the other explanatory variables.
Note at this point that although zero reporters have ben excluded, linear regression still predicts some negative values since it is based on
the assumption of a normally distributed dependent variable. The Heckman correction does not eliminate this possibility. Therefore, since
negative housework is not a meaningful outcome, we set to zero the negative housework predictions produced by our OLS regression.
This decision is supported by the results of a probit analysis we performed on the NSFH sample that modeled the probability of reporting
zero hous:work; all of those respondents with negative predicted housework in our linear regression were also predicted by the probit
model to be more likely than not to have self-reported zero housework hours.

[Footnote]
Also note that negative housework is only conceivable as work (or mess) creation, which may be relevant to theories of the domestic
division of labor but which makes little sense in a study that looks at individual reporting differences between survey contexts.
8. Typically, in a standard Heckman correction, the problem is sample selection bias. That is, some group or portion of the distribution is
missing for a substantive reason. For example, high school dropouts are missing from a sample of college graduates. A Heckman
procedure could be used first to predict who drops out of high school. We have no reason, however, to think this type of bias is true for our
population reporting zero hours of housework in either the AUT or the NSFH. Zero is simply a value of housework available to report;
these respondents are not actually missing. Thus, ours is not a true selection bias problem.
9. To focus on valid percentages for the cross-sample comparison, we have limited the presentation to nonmissing data. In the AUT, there
were no missing data on housework hours. In the NSFH, there were 19.8 percent missing cases out of 6,779 on housework hours. By
gender, this breaks down to 26.2 percent missing for husbands and 14.4 percent missing for wives.
10. The overall shift in husbands' unpaid labor supply to the household is composed of 2.34 more hours in housework and 0.29 fewer
hours in child care per week, on average. All estimates are calculated from Gershuny and Robinson's data presentation, Figures 4 and 5
(1988, 54748). This finding is net of compositional change in the population over time.

[Footnote]
11. Indeed, the raw correlations between the reporting gap, the total amount of predicted housework a respondent performs, and gender are
also very high, reinforcing our decision to break down our analysis by gender.
12. The predictions in Figure 2 are made for levels of total housework that fall within a 95% confidence interval around the mean for each
gender.
13. The mean socioeconomic index (SEI) is actually higher for the traditional group, but it also has a much larger variance for this group.
Both income and education in Table 8 describe the phenomenon that Hochschild articulates in her book.
14. The inclusion of interaction variables composed jointly of categories drawn from other predictors in the equation may introduce
problems with multicollinearity. This problem is particularly acute when using multiplicative interaction terms (Jaccard, Turrisi, and Wan
1990). Our interaction terms are categorical, however, with the highest correlation between the interaction terms and predictors only
reaching .58.
15. Although the inclusion of the "Hochschild dummies" for husbands produces significant t statistics for the added coefficients, these are
not adequate to assess the statistical significance of the

[Footnote]
model. Rather, testing for a significant increment in R-square is more appropriate (Jaccard, Turrisi, and Wan 1990). When that is done, the
Hochschild dummies (and the "supermom" dummy for wives in model 2) are all found to be statistically significant at the .OS level.
16. The R-squares for our models of the overreport are low. However, we believe it is worth presenting these models to explicate what we
conceptualize as the underlying causal model producing overreports.

[Reference]
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[Author note]
JULIE E. PRESS
University of California at Los Angeles ELEANOR TOWNSLEY Mount Holyoke College

[Author note]
AUTHORS' NOTE: We owe a debt of gratitude to several people who read drafts, gave comments, and/or helped us with statistical
methods: Simon Potter, Richard Berk, Eva Fodor, Ronald Jacobs, Michael Lichter, David McFarlan& Matthew McKeever, Susan
Markens, Ruth Milkman, Daryl Press, S. James Press, Ellen Reese, Laura Sanchez, Judith Tan rr, and Donald Treiman, as well as several
anonymous reviewers. All errors in substance and judgment remain those of the authors. We also wish to thank the Ford Foundation for
the generous funds to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) that supported this research (grant no. 910-0262j`).
REPRINT REQUESTS: Julie E. Press, Department of Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles, Box 95155, Los Angeles, CA
90095; e-mail: jpress@ucla edu.

[Author note]
Julie E. Press is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California Los Angeles and a graduate research fellow at the UCLA
Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. Her research program addresses gender, race, and class inequality in paid and unpaid work, and the
relationship between the two.
Eleanor Townsley is an assistant professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests include the sociology of
intellectuals, measurement, the state and the relationship between gender, work, and power. Her work has been published in Theory and
Society, New Left Review, and the Handbook of Economic Sociology.

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